Thus, for our purposes, genes aren’t about inevitability. Instead they’re about context-dependent tendencies, propensities, potentials, and vulnerabilities. All embedded in the fabric of the other factors, biological and otherwise, that fill these pages.

Thus for my purposes too.

Stress can be bad for you. We no longer die of smallpox or the plague and instead die of stress-related diseases of lifestyle, like heart disease or diabetes, where damage slowly accumulates over time. It is understood how stress can cause or worsen disease or make you more vulnerable to other risk factors. Much of this is even understood on the molecular level. Stress can even cause your immune system to abnormally target hair follicles, causing your hair to turn gray.

Thus [after reading this] adding to your stress.

Eyes often have an implicit censorious power. Post a large picture of a pair of eyes at a bus stop (versus a picture of flowers), and people become more likely to clean up litter. Post a picture of eyes in a workplace coffee room, and the money paid on the honor system triples. Show a pair of eyes on a computer screen and people become more generous in online economic games.

In other words, how can we make use of that here.

...stick your average person in a brain scanner, and show him a picture of someone of another race for only a tenth of a second. This is too fast for him to be aware of what he saw. But thanks to that anatomical shortcut, the amygdala knows . . . and activates. In contrast, show the picture for a longer time. Again the amygdala activates, but then the cognitive dlPFC does as well, inhibiting the amygdala—the effort to control what is for most people an unpalatable initial response.

No, you tell me what that means.

But consider a paper published in Science in 2008. The authors examined the relationship between math scores and sexual equality in forty countries based on economic, educational, and political indices of gender equality; the worst was Turkey, the United States was middling, and, naturally, the Scandinavians were tops. Lo and behold, the more gender equal the country, the less of a discrepancy in math scores. By the time you get to the Scandinavian countries, it’s statistically insignificant. And by the time you examine the most gender-equal country on earth at the time, Iceland, girls are better at math than boys.

No, you tell me what that means.

Look at systematic patterns of cultural variation as they pertain to the best and worst of our behaviors. Explore how different types of brains produce different culture and different types of culture produce different brains. In other words, how culture and biology coevolve.

Cue among others the assholes among us.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

You know what my mum once said? said Rosie… She said that if a just-married couple put a coin in a jar every time they make love in their first year, and take a coin out for every time that they make love in the years that follow, the jar will never be emptied.And this means…?Well, she said. It’s interesting, isn’t it?

Anyone here ever tried this?

What's it like then? asked Old Bailey. Being dead?The marquis sighed. And then he twisted his lips up into a smile, and with a glitter of his old self, he replied, Live long enough, Old Bailey, and you can find out for yourself.

Of course we never actually do, right?

People talk about escapism as if it's a bad thing. Once you've escaped, once you come back, the world is not the same as when you left it. You come back to it with skills, weapons, knowledge you didn't have before. Then you are better equipped to deal with your current reality.

For example, if it actually works out that way.

I feel like I am involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won't tell me the rules, and who smiles all the time.

Worse: strip poker.

Actually I didn't shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die, but he could tell I was extremely cross.

And it's not like that's against the law.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

A Brief History of Deconstruction 1. (we can't start with 1 because it bespeaks an unsustainably transparent unity) 2. (we can't start with 2 because it implies a stable dichotomy between 1 and 1) 3. (we can't start with 3 because it is a false figure for the dialectic)

Clearly, not brief enough.

Adorno: There is no right life in the wrong one Bataille: There is no right life Beckett: There is no life Schopenhauer: No

Some say it’s no coincidence that the question mark is an inverted plow, breaking up the hard soil of old beliefs and preparing for the new growth.

Name one other.

Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule. A sense of humor enables him to maintain his perspective and see himself for what he really is: a bit of dust that burns for a fleeting second. A sense of humor is incompatible with the complete acceptance of any dogma, any religious, political, or economic prescription for salvation. It synthesizes with curiosity, irreverence, and imagination. The organizer has a personal identity of his own that cannot be lost by absorption or acceptance of any kind of group discipline or organization.

What's so funny about that?

Curiosity, irreverence, imagination, sense of humor, a free and open mind, an acceptance of the relativity of values and of the uncertainty of life, all inevitably fuse into the kind of person whose greatest joy is creation.

Yeah, about one in a million.

This is the world as it is. This is where you start.

Right, and we all agree what that is.

A free and open society is an on-going conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises—which then become the start for the continuation of conflict, compromise, and on ad infinitum.

Who does this remind you of?

What the present generation wants is what all generations have always wanted—a meaning, a sense of what the world and life are—a chance to strive for some sort of order.

Cue the fucking idealists?

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.

While, for some women, it's a piece of cake.

The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.

On the other hand, imagine him running that by Freud.

It is only the things we don't understand that have any meaning. Man woke up in a world he did not understand, and that is why he tries to interpret it.

So, what do you think, elliptical enough?

Instead of the concrete individual, you have the names of organizations and, at the highest point, the abstract idea of the State as the principle of political reality. The moral responsibility of the individual is then inevitably replaced by the policy of the State (raison d’etat). Instead of moral and mental differentiation of the individual, you have public welfare and the raising of the living standard. The goal and meaning of individual life (which is the only real life) no longer lie in the individual development but in the policy of the State, which is thrust upon the individual from outside and consists in the execution of an abstract idea which ultimately tends to attract all life to itself. The individual is increasingly deprived of the moral decision as to how he should live his own life, and instead is ruled, fed, clothed, and educated as a social unit, accommodated in the appropriate housing unit, and amused in accordance with the standards that give pleasure and satisfaction to the masses. The rulers, in their turn, are just as much social units as the ruled, and are distinguished only by the fact they are specialized mouthpieces of State doctrine. They do not need to be personalities capable of judgment, but thoroughgoing specialists who are unusable outside their line of business. State policy decides what shall be taught and studied.

On the other hand, come on, there are any number of configurations intertwining "I" and "we". The real conundrum revolves around what to do about "them".

The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.

On the other hand, come on, there are any number of configurations intertwining "the past" and "the present". The real conundrum revolves around what to do about "the future".

Naturally, society has an indisputable right to protect itself against arrant subjectivisms, but, in so far as society is itself composed of de-individualized human beings, it is completely at the mercy of ruthless individualists.

Is there or is there not a post-modern rendition of this?

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

What is the meaning of life? Sartre: to be free. Camus: to rebel. Kierkegaard: to have faith. Nietzsche: to become yourself.Beckett: I can't remember, but it was something good.

Next up: What is the meaning of death?

People: "tell us, wise philosopher, what is the best government?" Plato: "a monarchy." People: "really? who would be king?" Plato: "ok, hear me out on this one…"

Probably not a true story.

How to be an existentialist: 1. Drink way too much. 2. Smoke constantly. 3. Don't get enough sleep for ten years straight. 4. Think the reason you feel shitty all the time is because you are, like, a really deep person.

Anyone here qualify?

Why study philosophy? Greece: to live the good life. England: to understand the world. Germany: to change the world. America: did u know philosophy grads have the highest average salaries of the humanities?

Spot the outlier?

Idealism: only my mind exists. Materialism: only matter exists. Dualism: both mind and matter exist. Existentialism: god damnit, who cares? Can't you see that we are going to die any second now?!

Well, that's true, right?

An existentialist is someone who is in despair despite the fact that they are good looking.

Or maybe even rich.

Last edited by iambiguous on Sat Mar 10, 2018 7:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

But news right now is like a flock of speeded-up sheep running off the side of a cliff.

Where's Nietzsche when you actually need him?

Nothing comic isn’t serious.

Not counting knock-knock jokes of course.

So that is what history is, people and places that disappear, or are beheaded, or get damaged or nearly do, and things and places and people that get tortured and burned and so on. But this does not mean that history is not the unseen things as well.

Right, like this put's all of that in perspective.

Maybe it's easier to talk to someone who won't ever actually hear what you say.

Or easier still to say nothing at all.

But now we live in a time and in a culture when mystery tends to mean something more answerable, it means a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV, usually one where we'll find out - and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that we will find out - what happened.

True, but every once in a while [these days] it's not a happy ending.

But I'm telling you. I swear, music. I get home, and it's the music again. Every night I hear it playing. I don't know what to do about it.Have you tried dancing to it?

And then there's always karoke.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Bitter, too, to be forced to acknowledge in one's heart how little love has to do with kindness.

No one forces me to of course.

Nothing is more foreign than the world of one's childhood when one has truly left it.

Me, I'm taking it to the grave.

No, the man said, looking past him with his empty gaze, the realm of the dead isn't anything. But to those who have been there, nothing else is anything either.

And how ironic is that?

And they are deformed though it does not show on the outside. I live only my dwarf life. I never go around tall and smooth-featured. I am ever myself, always the same, I live one life alone. I have no other being inside me. And I recognize everything within me, nothing ever comes up from my inner depths, nothing there is shrouded in mystery. Therefore I do not fear the things which frighten them, the incoherent, the unknown, the mysterious. Such things do not exist for me. There is nothing "different" about me.

Me more than you for example.

It is incomprehensible that he should want to have these futile people here, and still more incomprehensible that he should be able to sit and listen to them and their stupid chatter. I can understand that he may occasionally listen to poets reciting their verses; they can be regarded as buffoons such as are always kept at court. They laud the lofty purity of the human soul, great events and heroic feats, and there is nothing to be said against all that, particularly if their songs flatter him. Human beings need flattery; otherwise they do not fulfill their purpose, not even in their own eyes. And both the present and the past contain much that is beautiful and noble which, without due praise, would have been neither noble nor beautiful. Above all, they sing the praises of love, which is quite as it should be, for nothing else is in such need of transformation into something different. The ladies are filled with melancholy and their breasts heave with sighs; the men gaze vaguely and dreamily into space, for they all know what it is really like and realize that this must be an especially beautiful poem.

He said rambling on and on and on.

Only the gods have many destinies and need never die. They are filled with everything and experience everything. Everything - except human happiness. That they can never know and therefore they grudge it to men. Nothing makes them so evil and cruel as that men should presume to be happy and forget them for the sake of their earthly happiness.

But not your God, right?

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead.

This ring a bell for anyone?

I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.

Let's grapple with how different.

Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it.

Not counting the ones who are dying to.

Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?

The Big Bang 2.0?

We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.

Clearly a serious philosopher.

Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one, a moment, in childhood, when it first occurred to you that you don't go on forever. It must have been shattering, stamped into one's memory. And yet I can't remember it.

Has anyone here actually pinned that down?

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

But, especially in love, only counterfeit emotions exist nowadays. We have all been taught to mistrust everybody emotionally, from parents downwards, or upwards. Don’t trust anybody with your real emotions: if you’ve got any: that is the slogan of today. Trust them with your money, even, but never with your feelings. They are bound to trample on them.

Would you like me to trample on yours?

All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets, unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.

You can always count on me to.

For God’s sake, let us be mennot monkeys minding machinesor sitting with our tails curledwhile the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone.Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.

Or, sure, for goodness sake.

And besides, look at elder flowers and bluebells -- they are a sign that pure creation takes place -- even the butterfly. But humanity never gets beyond the caterpillar stage -it rots in the chrysalis, it never will have wings.It is anti-creation, like monkeys and baboons.

Let's decide: too harsh or not harsh enough.

One watches them on the seashore, all the people, and there is something pathetic, almost wistful in them, as if they wished their lives did not add up to this scaly nullity of possession, but as if they could not escape. It is a dragon that has devoured us all: these obscene, scaly houses, this insatiable struggle and desire to possess, to possess always and in spite of everything, this need to be an owner, lest one be owned. It is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease.

Shall we just chalk this up to a bad mood?

She looked at him, and oh, the weariness to her, of the effort to understand another language, the weariness of hearing him, attending to him, making out who he was, as he stood there fair-bearded and alien, looking at her. She knew something of him, of his eyes. But she could not grasp him. She closed her eyes.

Or: He looked at her....

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

How do you retain a spirit of affection and humor in a crazed, homicidal, unpredictable society?

My guess: You don't.

As fleeting emotions stalk it, a face can leak fear or the guilt of a forming lie.

Here, of course, we're just scratching the surface.

There is a furnace in our cells, and when we breathe we pass the world through our bodies, brew it lightly, and turn it loose again, gently altered for having known us.

Though not yet confirmed by science.

So often loneliness comes from being out of touch with parts of oneself. We go searching for those parts in other people, but there’s a difference between feeling separate from others and separate from oneself.

The only antidote that has ever [and always] worked for me is in being my own best friend.

It began in mystery and it will end in mystery, but what a rare and beautiful country lies in between.

Right, like this is actually applicable to all of us.

Every day our life was full of thoughts of the horrible present, and even our own death.

Right, like this is actually applicable to all of us.

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He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

It is important to popularize philosophy so that people who didn't used to take it seriously become convinced they were right.

Clearly, I'm doing my part.

In case you thought that the lack of women philosophers isn't a problem: Sisyphus was a sadist who murdered his guests, plotted to kill his own brother, and sexually abused his niece, but gets remembered for having to roll a rock up a hill.

Really, I didn't know that.

Not a conspiracy theorist, but Socrates and Plato never appear together in any of the dialogues.

Cue the serious philosophers: Any truth to this?

Alexander the Great was the first modern philosophy student because he quit grad school and got a real job.

Cue the serious philosophers: Any truth to this?

Cool how half of twitter, facebook, and youtube is fascists complaining that they no longer have the right to speak.

Cue the Kids: Any truth to this?

The internet often makes you forget that it's possible to be angry without telling other people about it.

No doubt about that here, right?

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.

Let's file this one under, "we're fucked".

Persons of genius are, ex vi termini, more individual than any other people - less capable, consequently, of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their character.

Me, if I do say so myself.

There is always need of persons not only to discover new truths, and point out when what were once truths are true no longer, but also to commence new practices, and set the example of more enlightened conduct, and better taste and sense in human life.

Not me, if I do say so myself.

It is given to no human being to stereotype a set of truths, and walk safely by their guidance with his mind's eye closed.

Not counting of course all of the millions it is given to.

The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.

Imagine then his reaction to, among other things, Trumpworld.

The love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal antagonism.

Imagine then his reaction to, among other things, Trumpworld.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable-even legally actionable-to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, "Hey fatty-lose some weight." By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of "health" and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self image.

Let's run this by the Kantians.

Western parents try to respect their children’s individuality, encouraging them to pursue their true passions, supporting their choices, and providing positive reinforcement and a nurturing environment. By contrast, the Chinese believe that the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future, letting them see what they’re capable of, and arming them with skills, work habits, and inner confidence that no one can ever take away.

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it.

Unless you can afford not to be.

Chinese parents believe that their kids owe them everything.

B.C. in other words. If you know what I mean..

That’s why I liked the Suzuki method of teaching piano. There are seven books, and everybody has to start with Book One. Each book includes ten to fifteen songs, and you have to go in order. Kids who practice hard get assigned new songs each week, whereas kids who don’t practice get stuck on the same song for weeks, even months, and sometimes just quit because they’re bored out of their minds.

Let's apply this to philosophy. For example, what would be Book One?

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Possible Democratic slogans for midterms: "We'll say mean things about Trump as we deregulate the banks." "Maybe Russian hackers are the reason you are poor?" "Okay fine, we'll raise the minimum wage, but no unions." "We promise to sell you out to the good kind of billionaires."

Let's call this a grim snapshot of our two-party system.

The year is 2233. A wise Philosopher King rules the Earth. Wisdom is mandatory. Also it is now legal to punch moral relativists in the face.

Can't come soon enough, right?

I don't know whether or not Mathematics exists entirely in our minds, but I know for a fact that authority does.